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ASKA me anything: talking about tri-Ace

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
kicking up a thread here, because even as i've been enjoying checking out all of these playstation 1 and 2 rpgs i never played before lately, tri-ace's games from the same era have long been favorites of mine. since they're not so active these days (if they were ever a huge deal in the first place), i imagine we don't need tons of threads for star ocean, valkyrie profile, and so on.

well, i definitely want to get some playthroughs of the vp games going at some point, especially since covenant of the plume, which i finally played this year, was fine, but ultimately had some of that mobile game-like "i'd rather just play the original games..." feel to it, particularly because of the art elements featuring the same style as the first game and most of the soundtrack being songs from it reconstructed out of ds-quality samples. but star ocean: till the end of time is a long-time favorite of mine, and one which i'd felt intimidated to come back to. i played it a lot as a teenager, and i really felt that if i was going to play it again, i'd likely spend an enormous amount of time on it. whether i simply wanted some new accomplishments in the game's "battle trophy" system, a kind of predecessor to the hd consoles' achievements which here apply only to combat feats but also unlock features like difficulty levels, character costumes, and easter eggs, or just to reach the stunning heights of skill in battle, performing nearly-perfect fights while controlling multiple characters, which i've only seen in others' recorded videos, it'd be quite a long journey. needless to say, that was a pretty daunting thought. plus i misplaced the memory card with the trophies save on it moving last year. i think i must have tried especially hard to put it somewhere clever, which of course i can't remember anymore. so that didn't help.

but as the reality of the world has really sunk in for the past six months (that i won't be going out to the barcade for shmups, or the other arcade to play mahjong and bemani games for a long time to come), and i find myself spending so many nights at the ps2 like i haven't since that time i dropped out of college...well, i really felt like it was time to give it a try and see how i even felt about it at this point, so i started my first new playthrough of the main story late last week, and even without skipping scenes, found my way to the end of the game already (i still remember a lot, once i'm actually doing it). i'm actually kind of surprised by how much my opinion of a lot of it hasn't changed, although since this is the first time i've watched all the story scenes since my first playthrough it's a lot more obvious to me how awkwardly paced and staged they are. the dub itself is pretty funny/corny for the most part too, but i don't mind that so much. and the characters all looking like people wearing those kigurumi masks isn't really so great either, although i guess it was kind of always like that and just sticks out as more bizarre/disturbing in my mind now. even by the time the hd consoles came out i remember thinking it was a pretty unfortunate attempt to capture an "anime" style in that kind of 3d (without a lot of lighting or other effects to help out; it definitely feels like smoothness in battle was their first priority for art design), but now, it's just...god, oof. i'm actually really curious what i'll think of radiata stories (which uses a lot more shading) and vp2 in comparison by now.

and some of the dungeon puzzles are among the most bizarre i can think of in any post-90s jrpg. i felt completely baffled by most of them back on my first playthrough and even now i don't think they're very clear, it's just that most of them are lodged deeply in my brain, or at least i remember enough of the concept behind them to stumble through them fairly quickly. that combined with the general meanness of non-boss encounters-especially after the first third of the game or so, i think there are quite a few you can get in which are possibly more difficult than the nearby bosses-really defines this game to me as one that's really unfriendly on a first play, and gets so much more enjoyable when you know both a lot of the critical path stuff and some tricks to smooth out some of the trickier parts of the game.

otherwise, i love this game so damned much, and especially with the sequels still being really nothing like it i really can't believe how it comes together. back when i was first playing it a friend told me to look at the gamefaqs board, where there was a community of incredibly skilled players, many of whom were also huge devil may cry 3 fans. and i feel there's a lot of similarities, although one is certainly that they're both pretty unforgiving to get into, with the super powerful defensive and movement options in each case requiring a lot of effort to master. obviously this game's a lot easier in a way, since there's not as much convoluted execution when you're controlling a single character, and engaging more and more with the rpg elements to get stronger offers a kind of sliding difficulty scale which can trivialize the even the postgame dungeons until the highest difficulties. but the moveset diversity across the cast (all of whom can take all of the regular bosses on alone successfully, if played well enough) and ability to use your characters' teamwork in various ways, from very directly comboing off each other, to powerful gameplans involving separate roles like tanking or control, or even aggressively micromanaging in a manner somewhat similar to final fantasy 7 remake (which is also fantastic in terms of characters being different to play) offers a tremendous variety of experiences. while the postgame is basically just a lot of dungeon crawling and features a fair number of recycled bosses before getting to some really difficult ones which can be pretty frustrating to learn, one of the areas that opens up changes based on the endings you got, and has always been one of my favorite parts of the game in terms of fights and aesthetics.

there's also a great system where you get extra rewards from battles, but only by continually winning in a streak, without loading, fleeing, or dying. (you can also lose it in battles you don't lose, but those are the main limitations) in the post game this mostly means finding an easy spot to farm out for a while, but in the main game there's a really fun risk/reward element where you can run all you want, but are incentivized to stay and fight even something dangerous for the chance at huge powerups and maintaining the streak. when you can get rolling you can rubberband SUPER hard even when you've been running away a lot, or want to level up and use characters who join very late and start out pretty weak by comparison. i think i gained about 20-30 levels across my party in about five minutes with a short sequence of boss fights and then a few enemies in the area leading to the last dungeon.

compared to 1 and 2, i think that the process of item creation for its own sake is downplayed a lot, even as the framing and process of recruiting other inventors elevates it to an entire minigame section slash all-consuming sidequest in the game; pretty much everything you can make has some kind of direct combat or dungeon-crawling relevance (or is just useless). stuff like the music and illicit money-making from the first two games isn't really present in the same way as far as i know, not to mention the axing of virtually the entire sub-skill system which unlocked crafting in that game. there's a lot fewer items which feel funny, strange, and rare, so the process of just doing gachapon with it like i've done so much in second story especially isn't as satisfying. and the gold saucer-esque area's minigames aren't really that compelling for me either.

i guess it may sound like the combat is the only thing i really like, at certainly that (and sakuraba's incredible ost, which i think is one of his absolute best and certainly one of the most varied) is the big draw that always keeps me wanting more. but i think the story's enjoyable enough, and i'm really fond of most of the main characters. the villains hamming it up is fun too, and certainly really memorable to my mind. and the variety of areas (combined with the music, where pretty much everywhere i go i just find myself thinking "i love this song!") makes it enjoyable to coast through and explore the areas and towns when i'm not getting crushed by battles. and the special (optional and slightly hidden) midgame dungeon from the director's cut version (the only one released internationally) is really cool. the puzzle design there, instead of feeling arbitrary, is very clear, but you have to decide which of the multiple objectives on each screen to pursue before finding a solution to reach it.

i've never played the versus minigame it unlocks.

i still really feel the game's pretty misunderstood, although since so much of what i feel is appealing and beautiful about it is a huge undertaking not unlike any other highly technical action game it's a lot more obvious to me now that i have a personality that it appeals to, particularly because of the multiple-character-controlling elements. likewise, it makes more sense to me that people who wanted to approach it much more straightforwardly (since stuff like the super polished fmvs and amount of content in general give the feeling of a final fantasy x-like game, which would only encourage that) would mostly be frustrated. but for now, knowing that for myself i've only scratched the surface of this one again, i'm really thrilled, just like i was the first time.
 
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Mogri

Round and round I go
(he)
Staff member
Moderator
Spines, you're writing about stuff that interests me, but I have a much harder time reading large blocks of text if there's no capitalization. At the end of the day, I know you aren't writing for me in particular, and I won't take it personally if you decide you like your personal style too much to abandon it, but I wanted to throw that out there.

I too am a big fan of tri-Ace. Valkyrie Profiles 1 and 2 are among my favorite games of the era. Covenant of the Plume is entirely whelming, but it's enjoyable and there's nothing especially bad to mention about it. The SNES Star Ocean was also fantastic -- they got a lot out of the hardware.
 

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
I have yet to find a Tri-Ace game that the gameplay really worked for me. Star Ocean: Til the End of Time was the closest I got to "enjoying" one of their games (I actually really liked the plot twist, which I know is unusual), but I found the combat difficult at best and was never able to finish it, even on the easy mode. I've tried a little of other Star Ocean games and found the combat system impenetrable; neither Radiata Stories nor Valkyrie Profile really drew me in. I don't think they're bad games, but there's some disconnect between what they make and what I look for in a game that I've never really reconciled.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
Spines, you're writing about stuff that interests me, but I have a much harder time reading large blocks of text if there's no capitalization. At the end of the day, I know you aren't writing for me in particular, and I won't take it personally if you decide you like your personal style too much to abandon it, but I wanted to throw that out there.
ha, to be honest, with the change of scenery here and the fact i've been typing more outside of very casual/fast venues like twitter and discord again i actually found myself having to really affect it a lot more than on the old forums, so certainly for my longer kinds of posts i agree it's probably worth reconsidering. i sort of loathe feeling like i sound too serious but i guess when it gets to repeatedly writing 2000 words about 15-plus-year-old games that ship has kind of sailed
I too am a big fan of tri-Ace. Valkyrie Profiles 1 and 2 are among my favorite games of the era. Covenant of the Plume is entirely whelming, but it's enjoyable and there's nothing especially bad to mention about it. The SNES Star Ocean was also fantastic -- they got a lot out of the hardware.
yeah, i liked covenant, the game's original aspects (story, tactics mechanics, the sort of "evil" twist on the vp character staples) are pretty solid. but in that sense i feel like more unfortunate that it leans on the nostalgic elements elsewhere, since i think the rest is good enough to have totally stood on its own. it still wouldn't have been my favorite game or anything, but it wouldn't have hurt to be reminded less of the first game, since not many things are going to come off too favorably in direct comparison to that for me
This thread needs more Resonance of Fate
i'm pretty sure i still don't actually understand the game. i really enjoyed it, but at the same time i've always found it pretty stressful to play and finicky, hahaha. i know this team's made some hard games even at default difficulties, but i feel like it's probably not supposed to feel so severe.

also it's kind of long
 

MetManMas

Me and My Bestie
(He, him)
I wish that Star Ocean: Integrity & Faithlessness had been a better game, I really wanted the series to succeed. Might try actually finishing the game instead of faffing about, I would like to see the rest of the game world even if I do have to backtrack over a lot of it.

Maybe if we're lucky Square-Enix will eventually decide to port the remaster of the Star Ocean 2 port to Switch and it'll actually get to see the light of day in other regions. It's the one (non-GBC) holdout on PS4.

Really should get around to getting First Departure on Switch...
 
i'm pretty sure i still don't actually understand the game. i really enjoyed it, but at the same time i've always found it pretty stressful to play and finicky, hahaha. i know this team's made some hard games even at default difficulties, but i feel like it's probably not supposed to feel so severe.

also it's kind of long

I don't recall it being that long, heck I was having so much fun I did all the side-quests after a point which I never do. It can be a bit confusing to wrap your head around for sure though.
 

Rascally Badger

El Capitan de la outro espacio
(He/Him)
On my replay list is Radiata Stories. I played it back in the day, but I didn't really understand it at all, so it wasn't a great experience. I really like everything about the look and the world of the game, though.
 

Mightyblue

aggro table, shmaggro table
(He/Him/His)
I got most of the battle trophies and cleared the coliseum in SO3 which was not an experience I'd wish on anyone, tbh. Lots of bullshit challenges and exploiting the GUTS mechanic to not have your fragile linchpin caster get instantly vaporized by the superboss about 50x over. Honestly, the MP kill mechanic is just there to make it easy to kill PCs and to disincentivize the use of techniques and spells. There's not too many ways for the PC party to effectively do MP damage to monsters outside items, and they're all sorta orthogonal to the main gameplay experience.

That said, tri-Ace seemed to make worse games the more they focused on the visual polish and presentation over the amazing hot gameplay messes they were famous for.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
I got most of the battle trophies and cleared the coliseum in SO3 which was not an experience I'd wish on anyone, tbh. Lots of bullshit challenges and exploiting the GUTS mechanic to not have your fragile linchpin caster get instantly vaporized by the superboss about 50x over. Honestly, the MP kill mechanic is just there to make it easy to kill PCs and to disincentivize the use of techniques and spells. There's not too many ways for the PC party to effectively do MP damage to monsters outside items, and they're all sorta orthogonal to the main gameplay experience.
Offensively, yeah, there are a handful of fairly easy-to-execute tactics which also happen to be fairly effective ways of doing MP damage (particularly the elemental sword buffs and some of Maria's laser attacks), although for the most part only enemies with disproportionately low MP totals are really going to die faster to them even if you're using those. wWhich only includes a handful of bosses through the game, most of which you'd need some kind of foreknowledge to actually know it'd be that useful. For grinding it's a bit more relevant, especially really late on when you can really steamroll some encounters by holding down Maria's giant death lasers.

On the other end the ultimate bosses definitely get obnoxious, but i feel that comes more down to the interaction of the ally and enemy AI concepts and the fact that they're much harder to react to than enemies in the rest of the game defensively (while also doing way more damage) than the quirks of the life systems. One of the big things I remember from my old playthroughs and reading was elements of the higher difficulty AI that are pretty abusable since the enemies focus on straightforwardly "optimal" choices, particularly running down characters who are actively spellcasting as a top priority since they can't move away and avoiding using blockable attacks if your characters guts are over a certain threshold (about 90%), but it's also not especially fun to deal with for the same reason. I really like the Convert Damage skill though, and the ability to have casters tank to some extent via their ability to draw aggro and use a "mana shield"-like spell, although not reliant on the MP death system, is really cool to me.

But I have been playing Unlimited Saga lately so I guess I'm also just especially inclined to view HP as more of a strange dream than a real rule.
 

Gaer

chat.exe a cessé de fonctionner
Staff member
Moderator
Spines I love this post and your streams of consciousness.

This thread has *also* made me realise that the psp remake of Star Ocean was released on Switch.

i really needs me some bullshit jrpg right now
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
i didn't pick that up since it came out about the same week as saga scarlet grace, haha. i really want to now, since i haven't played any version of 1 since the psp version was new. i did watch demi play the snes version a few months ago, which i still think is gorgeous even if i've never entirely gotten along with the controls by comparison to the newer games (and the snes version of tales of phantasia).
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
i finished my full galaxy playthrough. i ended up totally cheesing out freya with the invincible mirage setup because it was getting late and i wanted to just finish the game before going to sleep, but i had a ton of fun before that. postgame ended up hitting my nostalgia buttons a lot harder than the main game even, haha. storywise it's just fourth wall breaking nonsense and chibi-lenneth summoning some of the bosses you killed in the game to fight you again, but for how self-serious the main story is i still really enjoy disarming that for a bit of fanservice from the previous games and general jokeyness. already extremely happy i played this again, since it was such a reminder of how much i love the game. it's kind of satisfying when i realize i don't hate everything i liked in the 2000s.

i might try getting through most of a universe playthrough in a month or two. but there's a lot of stuff i want to play, so i'm not sure.

========================================

Anyway, the fifth main game came out a few years ago, and after how much I'd disliked The Last Hope I really wasn't ready to pay full price again. But it's like $20 now and that's a fair chance for me. So I started playing it last night. Although I'm certainly ready to have my impression of the game upended at any time, I'm currently cautiously enjoying it. There's still the weird mashup of AAA-ism and overcomplex tri-Ace jank, but that's clearly just the series' hallmark at this point, and it works a lot better for me than TLH's, albeit with some oddities. One of the big ones is the way that NPC dialogue pops up as you walk around, but as compared to something like FF7R it's not voiced, so the boxes just appear and you have to stand around a sec to read them (and depending on where you're standing sometimes move the camera...) But overall changing a lot of the cutscenes to more organic dialogue stretches is working for me so far, and the encounters similarly finally have a modern feel, where you see all enemies on the overworld and transition directly into fighting them on the local terrain when you get close. And it seems like Private Actions are maybe kind of back? Instead of the Mass Effect thing from 4 where you just talked to the characters on the ship between plot points. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing in either game, I think in SO4 it kind of makes sense from the perspective that most of the events you get that way focus on backstories that are never explained in the game otherwise, but it felt very dry compared to 1-3 where there was a lot more joy in sort of exploring the towns for events and stuff. There's a "role" mechanic that lets you affect characters' stats and battle AI, and considering I've already gotten access to a role which seems to have kind of weird effects (character fights less, but you get more money for winning the battle) this could be a pretty interesting system. And specialty skills from 1 and 2 are...probably not entirely back, but seem like they're going to be a bit more fleshed out at least in comparison to 3 basically only paring them down to crafting and attack boosts and 4 introducing gathering mechanics to complement that. To me it seems to be a sort of "greatest hits" approach, like the developers looking at some of the better parts of each game and trying to combine them while adding in a few new things. For a series that's been as all over the map as this one, I think that's not such a bad idea.

...and speaking of which, the battle system is very obviously building on 3, with a lot of expansions that make it friendlier. There are similar foundations, with the "guard weak attacks, break guard with strong attacks, dodge strong attacks or hit with fast weak attacks to interrupt them" system coming back, as well as holding buttons to activate special moves (which is one of my favorite "feel" things, and I'm very glad to have back), though with guard just on a button (instead of being based on the stamina system from 3) and the counterattacks and combo system both being completely changed, it feels totally different. Which is fine, because the movement, pacing, and stuff like character switching also feel totally different. The main character's basic moveset is modeled on Fayt's in 3, which is pretty comfortable and is giving me a lot of optimism about later characters (one of whom was in my party briefly, but I spent that short stretch of the game exploding everything with magic) feeling pretty different. And while I haven't entirely figured out the combo system yet it seems like you can chain each input (each combination of weak/strong, normal/special, and close/far once in a sequence for increasing damage each time). Maybe it's a bit more limited than that. The limitations that 3 had again only made sense in the context of the stamina bar existing, so. It's different, and I think that's fine this time. So far. There's a lot of ways it could go kind of sour, especially because it's so easy so far that I'm sure a huge difficulty spike is coming eventually.

For the most part I'm digging the aesthetic and presentation otherwise. Character models are a little weird (or...very weird in Fiore's case :| I find the concept sort of funny as 2D art, if not very appropriate for a game like this, but it's significantly more uncomfortable as a full 3d model), but the environments are fantastic. So again, par for the course for the 3D era of this series. The main characters are from the fantasy planet for the first time since the first game (2 I'm not counting since of the two choices there's one each way), which I'm also mostly liking; I think that the whole anachronism/"encounters with aliens (who are Earth humans)" premise is a lot more appealing than the "Earthlings become stranded in a real-life isekai (yes, I know that the literal meaning of that word makes it an oxymoron) for half of the game or more" thing. Especially with the fantasy planet having some elements of a Central Asian aesthetic, with some of the outfits and in particular the most gorgeous rugs I've ever seen rendered in a game. A Bride's Story with laser guns? Pretty sure that's a 7/10 minimum

kind of joking, but I imagine I'll be playing a lot of this next week, since we took it off
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
Tales of Destiny* is still one of my all-time favorites, and I played a lot of Star Ocean 2 back in the day, too. Resonance of Fate is on my radar due to recommendations too, mostly from this forum. Was Radiata Stories a hidden gem too, or am I thinking of Radiant Historia?

*Huh, I just looked it up, and that's not actually Tri-Ace - though the founders of Tri-Ace worked on Wolf Team, which did make Tales of Phantasia, so they're like spiritual cousins (and SO1 and ToP/D definitely have a lot in common). Well then!
 

Pajaro Pete

(He/Himbo)
Was Radiata Stories a hidden gem too, or am I thinking of Radiant Historia?

i don't think you're thinking of either of them tbh. radiata stories was like... suikoden meets majora's mask by way of tri-ace and significantly less than the sum of its parts. i guess it isn't really much like majora's mask aside from all the characters keeping a specific schedule, and the suikoden comparison is mostly that there are a bunch of characters to recruit (though i believe all recruitable characters come As Is so a lot of characters are just... literally useless).

i do genuinely like the aesthetic, the characters designs and the towns and the sepia filter, but the massive gameplay issue is that the only permanent save point in the game is in the main character's house, and going back to his house during certain hours of the day is what triggers story missions, so there's a lot of "let me just leave the game running until it's like midnight or 9 pm or whenever so i can save without starting the next story mission so i don't miss out on the sidequests that will disappear if i proceed to the next story beat"
(i guess that wouldn't really matter if you're playing it via a thing that has save states)
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
Tales of Destiny* is still one of my all-time favorites, and I played a lot of Star Ocean 2 back in the day, too. Resonance of Fate is on my radar due to recommendations too, mostly from this forum. Was Radiata Stories a hidden gem too, or am I thinking of Radiant Historia?

*Huh, I just looked it up, and that's not actually Tri-Ace - though the founders of Tri-Ace worked on Wolf Team, which did make Tales of Phantasia, so they're like spiritual cousins (and SO1 and ToP/D definitely have a lot in common). Well then!
yeah, the tales of phantasia team kind of split after the release of that game, with a lot of the cause to my understanding being conflicts due to the concessions made to namco to get the game published. "cousins" is a good description, and it's funny to me that the SO series really follows from the original version of phantasia in some ways, while phantasia was remade to more fit the direction that the tales series started in with destiny. (and so that the in-game characters would look more like the fujishima art that was made to be the "canonical" character designs) i do totally view the super famicom release as a tri-ace game, as gotanda was in charge of it, and they named their hd engine "ASKA" ("tri-Ace Superlative Knowledge-based Architecture"...hence the thread title), which seems to me to be an acronym engineered to refer to the phantasia summon of the same name

radiant historia is probably the game that you're thinking of if you've heard about it through this forum, though i'm a fan of radiata stories, and those two games also had a pretty fair share of shared staff as i understand.
i don't think you're thinking of either of them tbh. radiata stories was like... suikoden meets majora's mask by way of tri-ace and significantly less than the sum of its parts. i guess it isn't really much like majora's mask aside from all the characters keeping a specific schedule, and the suikoden comparison is mostly that there are a bunch of characters to recruit (though i believe all recruitable characters come As Is so a lot of characters are just... literally useless).


i do genuinely like the aesthetic, the characters designs and the towns and the sepia filter, but the massive gameplay issue is that the only permanent save point in the game is in the main character's house, and going back to his house during certain hours of the day is what triggers story missions, so there's a lot of "let me just leave the game running until it's like midnight or 9 pm or whenever so i can save without starting the next story mission so i don't miss out on the sidequests that will disappear if i proceed to the next story beat"
(i guess that wouldn't really matter if you're playing it via a thing that has save states)
yeah, i pretty much agree with all of this. most of the super strong characters do require getting a lot of prerequisite characters to recruit, but also the game is largely easy enough that there's not a major need to get them anyway. (though elwen is cool as fuck, so)
 

Mightyblue

aggro table, shmaggro table
(He/Him/His)
Wolf Team broke up prior to the release actually; iirc primary development was pretty much done but they had to go hunting for someone to fund the cart production due to the wild expansion chip they had to use for graphics compression to get it all to fit. Namco was the only one willing to bite on it as they didn't have a flagpole RPG series to compete with Square or Enix at the time, but they stipulated a bunch of changes major and minor; all the obvious Namco references, and the whole Gungnir mini-story is an extended Legend of Valkyrie reference, etc.

Given the magnum opus nature of Phantasia, this sorta pissed off a good chunk of the studio, and when management went ahead with the Namco deal they resigned in protest. And then somehow managed to develop and ship Star Ocean 1 in less than a year (with it's own crazy enhancement chip, funded by Enix this time).
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
the whole Gungnir mini-story is an extended Legend of Valkyrie reference, etc.
hahaha, i don't think i ever realized that. the rest of the game spends enough time referencing norse mythology that, while that bit suddenly pulls the main character away from the story while it's happening at a pretty arbitrary point in the game, it doesn't exactly not fit in overall
 

Mightyblue

aggro table, shmaggro table
(He/Him/His)
It's more of a post-facto thing to me, especially after I played Symphonia the first time and learned more about Namco's gaming history. No actual gods ever show up there.

Valkyrie shows up as a bonus boss/summon in Destiny 1 as well.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
I finished the story. The scenes are about as trashy-anime as I remember of 4's, though in different areas/ways so it's a little hard to compare. Don't think I liked any of the characters as much as Bacchus and Myuria from that game, but i used all my instant-affection-changing items to get Anne's ending. She's cute, loves cats, and has all my favorite anime-punches from 3. There's some stuff I think works a lot better though, including a few reveals kinda early on I thought were set up pretty well.

Otherwise, as the streamlining, scope, and simplification of the game started to become really clear, it felt a little less...shiny, but it's just pretty fun and breezy to play, so I had a hard time putting it down each night. It's definitely janky in some funny ways (my favorite being how easy it is to accidentally run away from battles which are far beneath you at the end of the game if you aren't controlling the main character. also the sound design starts crying once everyone is spamming huge attacks constantly, it's a real cacophony) and super easy, I even set up to just not receive experience for about 1/3 of the game so I could level up all the specialty skills faster and felt super overleveled by the end despite that, as well as beating a boss who was probably supposed to be more of a "start of postgame" thing (since the weapon I got afterward was about twice as strong as the tier 7 crafts I was able to make...got copies of a few of those crafted weapons in the last dungeon as well). I did do about 90% of the sidequests which probably helped cause that, but compared to the back and forth/wait for openings styles of 3 and (in a different way) 4 you mostly win by going in constantly, or sometimes baiting weak attacks to block if the AI uses them a lot or has heavies that are slow enough to react to.

Most of the characters do benefit a lot from combo changes though, Victor in particular has Albel's normals from 3 and being able to cancel the strong ones instead of being locked into his zigzag walk or the slow recovery from his close double slash is a tremendous buff. Kenny isn't as strong as Maria offensively, but between his nonsensically far normal attack range and having a half-decent walk speed means you can just hang back from super far and kite anything that decides to aggro you for way longer than you should probably be able to. Mages are also super strong in this one, it's not as fun of a playstyle for me without other attacks to mix in, but they're very useful even aside from the overpowering aoe healing you get at the end of the game. a lot of times it felt like i was almost done but the ability to claw back and stabilize from only one controllable character being alive is enormous in this game, even before you start busting out premier crafted consumables.

Overall, it's pretty effortless and fun enough to play, there's some fun and extraneous mechanics which do nothing "useful" (they even let you level up Oracle again!), the mystery bag style of item creation is back (but largely optional), and there are some weird ways to optimize grinding, so I'm pretty satisfied with the breadth of the game's mechanics as a trade-off for depth. There are also a ton of dialogue scenes that seem to be unskippable, PA scenes I don't want to watch over and over, and sidequests you have to do to unlock major skills/features, that it's almost definitely a game i won't play many times, if i go at it again at all. I did start on the post-game (which is...just a destination on the ship's teleporter map as soon as you get back to it from your clear save), but I might take a bit of a break before really diving into it. I don't think it'll change my opinion much anyway.

Would I recommend it? Not really, just play either SO1R, or 2, or FF7R again probably? Like, the former two are better mashy games with a lot of random stuff to do, and the latter is just a much better AAA action rpg. I still liked it tons, but overall it's one of the most junkfood games I can think of; very immediately satisfying for me but without anything truly filling. I guess mostly my opinion of the team in the HD era has kind of...stabilized, and I'll probably have to play TLH (international, obviously) and IU again sometime (I've picked up a copy of the latter recently...), on top of all the others I've been meaning to. At the time it was like "wow, these guys went from making a bunch of the coolest games I've ever played to...this" and now I have a lot more perspective on why that happened and what these games are, and really I remember Undiscovery being like 20 hours which isn't a bad length at all for a little RPG to play. At the time though, both of those games were just incredible disappointments for me, but now that I have a better recognition of and appreciation for overambitious jank (which, yes, their PS1 and 2 games also obviously have in spades, but I didn't recognize it as such in the same way at the time)...well, I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy Undiscovery more, at least. Honestly it's probably WAY the fuck more like this game than I remember, just thinking about the fields and the party mechanics and the huge battles where you have like a dozen party members out there at once.

And if they get to make a real game again I'll once again buy it fearlessly. Probably. this is one of those times that ONE FEAR meme would be relevant, but i'm not exactly sure what that one fear is. vp3 starring chibi lenneth and freya from so3?
 
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I kinda wish I could've stuck it out for Integrity and Faithlessness longer than I did but the simplification hit me hard and fast within about 2 hours of an absolutely glowing first impression. I dropped it shortly after and followed your exact advice of playing SO2 again instead. I picked up SO1R and I really need to actually get around to playing it.

Radiata Stories is one of my favorite PS2 rpgs despite its clear faults though. I wish it went for the Chrono Cross gimmick of eventually being able to get THE WHOLE ROSTER. I would've been so hype to have Elwen in the same party as my other favorite characters.

But my deepest wish relating to tri-Ace is that some day Valkyrie Profile 1 will finally become available on a platform I don't hate using. It was only last year someone here told me it was on iOS and Android after thinking it got totally left in the dust for years, but why the hell isn't it on anything else? I couldn't afford an original PS1 copy even back before 2010 when it was still only around $100, much less now.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
god, i know though, i'm fortunate enough to be living with someone who owns one anyway for a currently indefinite amount of time, but i've virtually never had enough money to justify buying one of my own otherwise. i did at one point have the umd version, which despite its own flaws was (for many years, anyway, i guess it's also gone up) pretty passable for the price, but now that i don't have a working psp and it's never been available for download onto my vita, doesn't feel like much of a real solution either

there's a game store up in the college town a half hour away with the japanese LE though, and every time i've gone for the past couple years i've gotten closer to buying it. i did buy the one for 2 they also had earlier this year, not because i necessarily like the game more (or less, i think i have pretty equal but different love for them), it just seemed to have cooler stuff to look at.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
Last Hope.

I could write thousands of words just about how I was so excited for this game, and hated it SO much when it came out that I quit 2/3 of the way through and sold the game in angry bitterness and almost didn't buy Resonance of Fate, then bought the PS3 "International" release of the game to see if it was really that bad or if I was just disappointed from expecting something else and still had mixed but mostly negative feelings, but...that's basically the gist. But with 5 being sort of bad in opposite ways (combat being really straightforward and mashy, none of the characters were as appealing as some of the better ones from this game but the story makes more sense (while running fanservice to the old games in completely different ways), tons of unskippable scenes) and reason to believe I really hadn't understood the mechanics in the first place...well, I decided I had to try it one more time. (And while the remaster certainly can't fix everything, because whoooof some of those character designs and models, the environments are still gorgeous and being able to quit and reload the entire software in 15 seconds instead of waiting for tons of disc loads hugely reduces the problem where you start dying in late/postgame and have zero ability to stabilize but have to wait for character switch cooldowns to get wiped and game over to reload.)

The early stretch of the game really is awful; I remembered the "trick" from before so the first boss wasn't too painful, but I had forgotten the next one and really had to wonder if I'd made a total mistake trying the game after I died on it a few times. Of the eight "major" bosses in the game, five of them have weak point mechanics and take super low damage otherwise, and it's not clear at all how much HP they have or if you're doing "a lot" when you hit the weak point, because the numbers on weak points are much higher than you can hit on other enemies and the numbers otherwise are incredibly low. Not to mention the first two bosses have some of the hardest mechanics to deal with for those weak points (though in part because your party composition and movesets are really limited). By the third one the game just hands you a new character with a better weapon than anyone else has, and a skill that can straight up kill the boss in one combo if you turn off your other party members' attacks (if they hit it too much it'll get a chance to break out of the combo instead), though that's the only one that's quite so easy. But that second one takes a few minutes even with tightly executed multi-character combos and is absolutely miserable to flail at, especially as it drags on and on.

But now that I've finally managed to dig into the postgame stuff and colosseum solo battles, it really does come together, and where SO3 was inspired by fighting games and the very early era of character action (a genre that was just getting started early in the PS2 era), 4 really ramps up the latter to a huge degree. The movement is incredibly powerful and hitstun is a lot more reliable and consistent (is the enemy in rush mode? most things won't hitstun unless you combo'd into them. is the enemy not in rush? pretty much anything works.), so it feels pretty straightforward to pull off a lot of sick moves with a single character and also a lot easier to manage multiple characters at once, since the spacing and juggles are a lot more predictable. The moment where it truly clicked for me was when I was playing Arumat and getting chased by a tornado spell, but managed to blindside a different enemy to teleport behind them and completely avoid it while also setting up a killer combo. Of course, that's why the enemies have been tuned up a lot as well overall, with plenty of ways to not just die for free to your incredibly powerful offensive tools. (3 does have a couple random enemies who are probably more busted than anything in this game since they can just run up and shoot you to death with perfect hitstun and there's virtually no manageable way to strike first without items, but if they were in this game they would be totally free since you'd have plenty of opportunities to just bop behind them and they'd get stuck attacking.) And obviously plenty of them are fairly easy, or only difficult because they appear in large groups, or because the incentive of using Blindsides or other setups to build battle bonus means taking bigger risks. The competing incentives and multiple characters to switch between and control either in sync or to try and manage different elements are, like 3, the big draw of this game versus something like DMC or Bayonetta where the individual characters are more robust and complex to play. But I'm definitely feeling it this time, when I never have before.

Though, even more than 3, that's pretty much the game. Item creation and battle trophies have been scaled up to much, much bigger grinds than before (aside from the 10,000/50,000 enemies and battles ones, anyway), and PAs and exploration are streamlined down a lot, with the former virtually all taking place on the ship between story segments and the latter mostly encouraged by the sidequests they brought back in 5. (Though since you have to actually talk to NPCs to get them unlike that game, it feels a little more personal and interesting.) The plot is weird Star Trek fanfic, centering on the setting's version of the "Prime Directive", by way of JRPG Cosmic Angel Monsters and plot chapters that feel rather like anime episodes, several of which have bizarre foreshadowing or over-the-top endings before the game moves onto the next one. There's a pretty clear sense of continuity, but the step to each new area until the endgame is pretty non-sequitur and the storyline just ends for pretty much every NPC on the planets as soon as you leave. Often because they die or the planet explodes. Everyone joins out of the power of friendship, except Arumat (who looks like Sephiroth but with a bare midriff and a bunch of pectoral cleavage, and uses a huge retracting laser scythe. He just wants to fight the bad guys and then die.) and Myuria (she thinks Edge's friend killed her husband and wants to get revenge. She tells him this numerous times, then when she officially joins the crew cynically declares herself a "friend" anyway (but eventually discovers the true power of friendship)). It's terrible, though as someone who's watched quite a lot of Star Trek and read quite a lot of fanfic it's hard for me not to want to think about it more through those glasses (see, because there's two lenses). Maybe later.

I think this game is a lot more dislikeable and hard to recommend than probably any other tri-Ace console game (I feel like 5 and IU, while not as exciting and memorable, are also a lot less frustrating to just get in and play, and a lot less trashy and pandering), but I've had a lot of fun and excitement with it this time, and I'm still pretty fond of some of the characters, with a couple of them even growing on me. Really not sure how far I'll go with this one, but since it's pretty brisk after the initial hurdles there's a good chance this playthrough will go on for quite a while and I'll get on another one eventually.
 

Mightyblue

aggro table, shmaggro table
(He/Him/His)
I think I knew I was in for a wild ride the moment you got into the first couple of battles with Reimi in your party and her victory pose (or whatever you want to call it) was just a pan up her bodysuit'd ass.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
the real relief of playing this game is realizing that, while it's not as if all their other games are wholly free of sin, this really is the only one like this
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Star Ocean First Departure R is a charming, fun little game, but the battle voices are among the most annoying in any video game I've ever played. Why can't I at least turn those off? Half the time the whole party talks over each other so I can't even make out what they're saying!
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
Silmeria.

As I recall, by the time I had a playstation VP1 was like an $80 game that I couldn't find at a store ever, and by the time this game came out it was over $100. As a result, I hadn't played it when I bought this one (one of the first games I remember paying $50 for!), though there was some kind of word it was a prequel anyway.

It is not. Although it takes most of the game before it finally tips its hand like that (with stuff like Arngrim being a previous incarnation used as a kind of misdirection, I feel like the story is pretty hard to really parse without a familiarity with the first regardless. There's a lot of emphasis on things that are obviously supposed to make you go "what is HE doing here?" or otherwise foreshadow twists which you don't have any real context for. And that's all fine, I think, because if you bought a tri-Ace game you either just want a bunch of wonky convoluted bullshit to play with for 30-3000 hours, or you played the others and are ready to appreciate the references and the fact that about 75% of the enjoyment of the story of this game is having a suspiciously helpful villain you may love to hate join the party within the first couple hours. The localization work really helps, though, selling some scenes that I think could've easily fallen completely flat. This game, FF12, and DQ8 all came out in English within about a year, I want to say? I felt that the late PS2 and some of the DS stuff was a really strong era for SE's localizations, and that stuff that came out a few years later (at least that I played) was often not quite at the same level. (I did notice from SO4's credits that that game was a pretty early 8-4 job, and based on what I could make out of the JP voice track this time...well, uh, they definitely worked hard on it. and there's a lot of funny minor dialogue, but the material as a whole...)

I have about a million stupid random thoughts, like "Alicia's mage friend is one of the most Nomura-ass characters I've ever seen outside of a FF/KH game", but I probably said most of them out loud and that's usually good enough.

VP1 is one of those singular games built around a central concept that replaces most of the usual JRPG trappings that makes it pretty hard to copy without using some kind of similar conceit, and considering they already used Ragnarok as the climax in that game the decision to make the sequel a bit more standard is...fairly reasonable. You have shops (with the convoluted "selling monster loot" mechanic that really started taking off around this time...it kind of fits well with what the game is in a way, but it can also be really annoying to figure out what they expect you to do to get the items), towns (in the same side-scrolling view as the dungeons), and a more linear plot focusing on a smaller number of main characters, with the Einherjar sidelined more to background detail rather than the center of the story scenes. And you don't give them to Odin since you're fighting against him very obviously this time, so for mechanics reasons they reincarnate instantly as their adult selves as soon as you let them go, which is one of the more odd/narrative contrasting elements of the game. I think it's fine they went in such a different direction though, as one of the things I've always really liked is that they never seemed satisfied and just wanting to do the same thing again, always pushing for something new. In this case, that's mostly the battle system and ancillary elements (the ways it ties into dungeon puzzles, the shop system, etc.), which takes the "each character is a button!" thing and expands it out in about a hundred different ways.

Unfortunately, the amount of complexity really means this game kind of sucks way more to not remember stuff in than SO3. I picked a lot of the platforming back up right away, and the dungeon exploration was really fun as a result since I got to come fresh at it again but with all my skills, but having no clue where to fish for runes, what stuff to buy, is really rough. The difficulty curve is SO janky, and while it's maybe fair for the game to expect you to have spent some time grinding early on to try and get stuff since the game is really designed around smacking stuff to find out what you can do with what drops, but the early game power level increases are so low when you're just kind of blindly stumbling around that it's easy to feel like you're falling further and further behind...until you're suddenly not, because the game starts just handing out huge upgrades that can pretty much get you all the way back on the curve, and enemy damage and HP plateaus a bit.

Overall though, I still think it's kind of incredible. Definitely the most systems-laden of their games, except maybe Resonance of Fate (though my impression of that from the time I played through it is that there's a bit more of a directly "correct" way to play), with a truly ludicrous amount of interacting factors for everything in combat. Of course, in VP1 the kind of obvious route to go for dungeon battles was to take a bunch of mages and nuke out all the enemies with hardcast spells rather than trading combos with them, but in this game trading blows is even worse, so like 90% of the game is about finding things, which in some cases feel like exploits, so you don't have to. Poison a boss and run away forever so he can't update his turn action to a self heal or a targeted kill on someone, or run circles around some huge thing's tail so they can never catch up, or if they have a permanent blind-spot just use a meter-neutral combo so you can keep looping it forever while the boss does nothing. Or just send in one person to hit a few times so that even if they get targeted and die you can just get them back up safely for another round, preferably with a ton of stacked damage modifiers so they only have to hit a couple times anyway. Which kind of seems to be the intended approach, but is also the most knowledge-heavy one. It's the kind of thing that lets you get to the point of basically one-shotting bosses in the postgame dungeon, though, so...

...so there was a bit in the TLH interview I read a while ago about how the staff spent practically the entire development cycle playing the game and adjusting it, and it's really hard for me not to wonder if they got so good at that game they just kind of overtuned a lot of it? But now that I look at things that way I kind of feel that in TTEOT and this game as well, and maybe even elements of the PS1 games, like VP1 having an ending that requires you to do a bunch of story-related stuff that's not entirely obvious if you don't know how the story is supposed to go. Though, this game has a generally more sensible approach to that difficulty overall, and was really ahead of its time with a New Game Minus feature where you can keep playing more loops with harder enemies (and no bonuses to speak of). Obviously the "harder second time" is something Dark Souls made famous that seems to be pretty popular in a certain set, and this one starts off kind of rough if you have some ideas for what to do after the first time (I think I finished about two bonus cycles back in the day, though the stat increases are much slower after the first one) and ends up at a point of utter absurdity where every "leader" enemy (bosses and enemies that end battles when defeated even if other enemies are alive) has something like 25x as much health. Took a few years of people trading around saves to get the FIFTY clears required, especially since they start taking a real long time once some of the best cheese strats stop being viable, but now I think pretty much everyone uses the same one that was uploaded on gamefaqs ten years ago. (And despite the health totals and some of the bosses taking 20 minutes like this, some of the bosses are *still* killable in a couple minutes. It's just that kind of game.)

I also remembered this being one of the better-looking PS2 games, and while while I wouldn't say it can just stand right up there with even early HD games at this point, the art direction and textures are pretty ridiculous, and it definitely still feels to me in the same vein as FF12. In this case it seems like they really took advantage of the limited camera, since it really cuts down on how much is actually rendered and let them manipulate exactly what the player sees. Though, the battles don't have that excuse...anyway, there's still some stuff that's pretty funny to see again now that I'm better at looking out for them, with less important characters getting flatter faces and some gratuitous effects (lens flare in some later areas, and the most convenient town on the map for most of the game has a ton of bloom effects in every scene, which actually warped my memory to the point where I thought the game had a lot more of them).

The music is still great. I've considered it my favorite Sakuraba soundtrack overall for a long time, and playing really reminded me of why. There's some stuff that feels a lot like Dark Souls in retrospect, as well, which is funny to me because I definitely felt by the time I played that game that most of it didn't sound much like how I thought of him, without really a lot of the synths he's known for and Gwyn's theme being the only real standout keyboard track of any kind, but some stuff here like the Valhalla theme is absolutely taking that kind of bombastic vibe. That isn't nearly one of my favorite songs in the game, but it's easier to see this one as a stepping stone for him as a whole stylistically, with a synthy but very strings-driven battle theme and a lot of really gorgeous pieces with more "traditional" instrumentation for towns and dungeons. (though I say this when pretty much all the songs he did for Resonance of Fate a few years later are like...grungy rock tracks) It's definitely a change of pace from the first game, where practically every dungeon theme sounded like it could've been a battle theme, though there's still a couple of those here...as well as the most gratuitously wanky prog songs I think he's ever put in a game (beating SO3's "Highbrow" BY FAR even though that song is ten minutes long). But overall, in terms of the mood and atmosphere, I think it's about the most his songs and a game have really come together like that. Other stuff, like his SO2/3 soundtracks, VP1, Tales of Phantasia have a great feeling where practically every time anything kicks in I think, "I love this song!", but it's the kind of "love" where it's like..."it's a cool song in a fun game!" and pretty nostalgic. Here, I think the music brings a lot of the melancholy mood that serves the game nicely, and the songs that really contrast that are used more for a kind of humorous effect.

In the end, I think it's an awesome game, still one of their best, though compared to SO3 I guess I feel like I've already gotten a lot of what I wanted out of it again with just this one playthrough (though I've still got some time in Seraphic Gate to go before I'm putting it away and maybe moving onto the first game or one of the newer ones I still haven't been to in a while. I feel like I've been kind of saving RoF and RS especially because those are games I've been meaning to put a lot of time into at some point). A lot of that is just having done 5-6 back when it was new, though, since I do absolutely think it's a game with a lot of variety and plenty to enjoy-I think I'd like to come back to it a little more often than I have, but not so much that it starts to feel rote.

Though, I have been thinking of getting back into speedrunning again, and "JRPG" and "Wolf Team-adjacent" describes like 80% of the games I've spent time on in that sense. It's what I like, so I don't see a reason to change that...this one looks like a good candidate at first glance because it's short and fast, with a lot of cool dimensions to show of skills in, but it's incredibly random and seems super frustrating at the same time, hahaha. So probably not.
 
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VP2 is the only tri-Ace game I've played through more than once, or finished the bonus dungeon in. For most of my first playthrough I was really struggling and chipping away at bosses and everything took forever, and around the middle of the game I just started splitting the party and using only one character to attack in boss fights while the rest were only for kiting and menu magic, largely because a single character has an easier time pulling off exploits like the ones you mentioned, running in circles around a big enemy or otherwise avoiding their attack range forever. It seemed to get a bit easier with that strategy, but I still wasn't having much fun.

But at some point in the final dungeon, the combo system clicked into place, and once I finished the game I started over almost immediately, more to prove to myself that I had really learned how to play it correctly than because I had much affection for it at that point. Between doing better combos and knowing how to optimize damage properly, I was getting Direct Assaults in almost every battle; I think the only boss I didn't DA was the undead dragon, which I still killed in one combo, it just went on long enough that it didn't count as a DA. Took out the last ~50% of the final boss' HP with a combo ending Valkyrie Soul Crush, and it was one of the best feelings I've ever had in a game. Blasted through Seraphic Gate after that.

I think the Souls comparison is apt, as I had much the same experience with Demon's Souls of getting really frustrated but pushing through and eventually beating it, then replaying and having way more fun with foreknowledge of the game. The prospect of being annoyed by a game for 20-30 hours to eventually have fun replaying it doesn't really appeal to me anymore, but I do have fond memories of VP2 as the first game to give me that kind of experience.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
radiata stories.

This was one of the first ps2 games I owned. I played through each of the stories and then spent a while talking with the friend who recommended it to me; he was a guy from sda and wanted to see a run happen, so we worked on that (for the "fairy" ending) for like a year off and on. Another person found a guy's geocities page with summary notes of his routes for single-segment/rta play, and I messed with those for a while, trying to implement really aggressive enemy skips (it's very hard/random in this game) which required even more novel strats to actually survive some late game battles.

I feel like I know things about this game's battle mechanics that no one was ever meant to know. There's a terrific, intense, extremely difficult to execute strategy for killing Cross near the end of the game at a super low level without any good attackers, but the margins of this post are too small...

Anyway, I lost a bit of interest, never quite put it all together, and although I had a lot of a very decent run on tape, I eventually gave up and haven't played it at all since around then, which would be around 2008 or 9 I think. I remember most of the higher level mechanical concepts I learned and some of the more memorable character recruitment sequences, as well as a couple of bits that already hadn't aged well by the time the game came out. But a lot of plot details (especially from the human ending) and other stuff had rolled off by now, and when I was playing a bunch of Star Ocean last year I considered going for this one next, but decided I was going to do it after Valkyrie Profile because I figured a couple VP playthroughs is probably 30 hours for me and this game was gonna be a solid 70-90 hours at least (and that's if I decided not to study it again, which I have to admit is still a kind of tempting idea in some ways). But as one might guess from the fact I never posted about it in this thread...I have not actually gone to play VP1 again yet. Still, after I finished Moon: Remix RPG Adventure six months ago I've been kind of waiting for my chance to go at this one again, and we had a long weekend and didn't want to go outside, so to me, this was the perfect time to sit around and stalk townspeople for 30+ hours. This is the kind of game where, maybe I don't want to play it for 20 minutes if I'm literally not sure if I'll manage to do anything, but balanced over a much longer session there's not much sting to trying to find something for 40 minutes and failing, since I know eventually a bunch of things will line up at once at balance it out, and busting through the game in a short real-time period also helps with "wait, that was the hint I needed for..." Which is not as big of a thing in this game as Moon, but there's still a bit of that "if you can't find the solution now just do other stuff and come back another time" attitude.

So my goal for this playthrough was to get 100 friendbook entries and finish postgame, and...I'm at 99 and otherwise done with this file. I missed a couple pieces of the recruitment chain that gets a couple of "ultimate" characters, but it's not really that big a deal and was a good reason to just pick out some usually hapless characters who unavoidably join late and underleveled. Although it took me a while to find ones that really felt good in the long run, I had a great time with it.

The music is by Noriyuki Iwadare, instead of the usual tri-Ace Sakuraba fare, and he brings an easygoing swing feel with a lot of the major overworld and battle tunes that's really appropriate for a more laid-back kind of game, and at night many of the area themes kick down even further, keeping familiar elements but taking out the percussion for a quieter vibe through the hours most people are sleeping (at least at some point). I'd probably choose "POWERFUL ENEMY!" as a standout battle theme, and while my favorite area theme in the city is probably "Outsiders" (alternate version), for the bandit guild area, one of the overworld themes probably better represents the game's style, with my favorite being "Itinerant Party." Also, you can get records of most of the songs, with a huge proportion of them being purchaseable from shops, and play them on a phonograph, which is kind of familiar even if you can only play it at home rather than being able to carry it around with you.

Anyway...the game definitely doesn't have quite the same kind of magic as Moon, which delights in more fully surreal weirdness and is definitely more elegantly designed despite the relative strictness of the lifebar mechanics, since in this game there's no comparable progression chain. A lot of the appeal of the game even now comes from walking around the areas, and especially the capital city, which is visually full even if so much of it is functionally out of bounds or not accessible to the main character, and seeing the bustle of characters crossing the town, heading out for a meal, hanging out with pets, or even just chilling right outside his front door (which is under a very popular bridge). There's some odd consequences to all this, beyond the clockwork sense of it all, which for as intricate and appealing as it is, the fact that learning about and cooperating with all the characters is the true goal of the game sort of means that the point is kind of to dispel that illusion (although one might argue that is very moon-like). Plus if you put someone in your party they get "removed" from their normal schedule, which ends up kind of weird for certain characters who hang out together frequently or even all the time (although this is also sometimes how you figure out the answers to puzzles, so...). Also it's just kind of a mess that it can be so hard to tell if you're unable to complete something it's because you're at the wrong point in either your RPG battle levels or the game's main story, which just kind of happens as time passes for the most part; you can occasionally put it off freely, but more often than not the places you can go will be limited, or you can only avoid causing plot triggers to happen by entering your room late at night or doing other workarounds. As a result, although I certainly feel like they were going for a similarly "organic" feel where the story keeps coming whether you're ready or not, it's more than a bit janky. Of course, if you spent long enough trying to get a hold of someone the first time, at least it'll be easier when you finally CAN get them.

But even on the individual level, there's so much appeal to the characters; aside from the outliers with more prominence in story they tend to have maybe 10-15 different lines on average, but getting to see their hobbies and quiet moments outside, the way they move and fight, and even dress (as quite a few of them have multiple outfits you might catch at night or early in the morning). Of course with the better part of 200 to put in your party they tend toward pretty broad caricatures, though with only a few I feel strongly negative about (mostly the set of really greedy priests), but it really makes me happy even now to play a game with the systems so focused on developing characters via details and unique mechanics. Actually, the way the battle system is a little simple but also focused on team abilities, and also that you're always kind of stuck relying on that and can never just become so powerful or skilled to make all the battles go exactly "perfectly"...it's a lot like FFXV like that, which is another game I played this year that emphasized character systems over "traditional" mechanics.

In fact, considering some of that, at this point I'm kind of struck by how much it seems to be going for a heavily curated attempt at some of the early concepts of the open world game (though the obviously indisputable example of a weird Japanese B-team going for this around the same time is Steambot Chronicles, which was another game I was thinking about picking up over the long weekend before I chose this one...). The world is full of interactable objects, except the verb you get for them...is "kick". You kick things and items might appear, like mashing X around the edges of the screen in FF9, or Kaim in Lost Odyssey reaching into pots constantly, but you have to aim better. As a method for getting free stuff it's not that critical mechanically after the first few hours, and only solves a few puzzles in relation to objects, but it's truly impressive that the entire world is full of stuff that shakes, tips, or opens when you kick it. Pretty much all with unique animations by class of object, and at a fidelity that matches everything else in the game (which is not especially high polygon but has a very strong art style and some interesting lighting stuff in spots). I think that like Silmeria these visual effects are heavily facilitated by keeping the world stuck in a functionally side scrolling perspective; it's not a strict 2.5D like the environments in that game as you can walk back and forth a bit, and there are lots of softer path forks than that game's hard right angles leading to new planes, but you can't make the world camera do anything it doesn't want to do, which is pretty weird in one specific area that is actually closer to fully rendered and explorable. Another funny element of the world design that goes with this is that the entire world is divided up by huge canyons with bridges (of various kinds depending on who lives nearby), which both serves as the "you can't go here" mechanic in many places but also offers a funny compromise between letting you see stuff far away and actually having to render huge chunks of surface land.

Also, you can kick people. Occasionally this has something to do with how you recruit them for the party, but if you do it repeatedly it'll start a duel with low stakes (I don't think you can ever die and at worst the person you fight might be upset with you for the rest of the day). One of the cool parts of this is that they just have their stats. Well, actually I should try dueling someone I leveled up a bunch to see if it changed, but definitely anyone you haven't recruited is the same combat character as an opponent that they are once you get them. And this includes the cameo character in the bonus dungeon, who has about 9000 health...it's pretty low for a boss fight at that point in the game, but it is ridiculously high compared to any other playable character, and she still has it once she joins. Really since you game over if you die just letting that character loose on the last bosses afterward with a bit of healing support is the simplest way to handle the rest of the postgame, too. But usually people who want to fight you before they'll join will fight when you talk to them at the right time and there's no need to do this, but aside from having a unique line for most playable characters you can learn some odd things about the world by doing it, especially with people you really can't get much out of otherwise like some of the people in the castle. Who will usually summon guards instead of doing it themselves, especially if they're, like, ghost children, or already just helmeted guards themselves.

Anyway, it's a very strange world, and to the extent the main story goes into cosmology and politics and whatever else is going on, the resolution ignores all of the consequences of it on either path. Which maybe makes sense, because the main character, befitting a person who will kick everything in sight and spend days trying to figure out what women are brooding about in the sewers, is pretty foolish and doesn't have much interest in the larger picture. I think it contributes to the perception of the game as being kind of unfocused or whatever, but more than ever I sort of like that vibe. Jarvis tells Jack a couple hours into the game that he should try making friends with as many people as possible, so he just does that, and whatever else the guy from the castle and the guild tell him to do. He ropes a bunch of people with their own busy lives into witnessing some epochal world-changing events and maybe confronting some of his personal issues (and a dragon) but in the end there's no moral about the power of friendship or anything, and everyone who he interacted with is just going to carry on because they were already doing their own thing.

I kinda love it. Well, I really liked most of this game so much more than I remembered, maybe even more than VP2. There's definitely some degree of attitude there, like I was excited to hang out and understand this game again where with VP2 I was a bit more frustrated that even though I felt like I was trying pretty hard it took quite a while to really get back on the knowledge level the game ultimately feels designed around. But one of the things I've enjoyed about playing all these games for the first time (usually) since I was in my teens and didn't have as much knowledge and experience with others is getting that chance to kind of see more context and contrasts with other RPGs and games that I wasn't as aware of at the time*, so being able to feel like so much of the game was almost new for me even as I remembered liking it plenty already was really the best of both worlds this time. I'll definitely play the other route and may or may not wait for another holiday type weekend before going for it, although the other inhabited regions are not as spread out as the town and I probably won't worry about rushing postgame again, so it should be a bit easier to sink into with shorter sessions.

*although as I say this it's probably worth noting that VP2's existence also makes considerably more sense to me another year later now that I know where Monster Hunter was at culturally and mechanically in the mid-2000s. on the slate for 2022: i guess i should finally play something like dragon quest iii**

**but my next single player on the couch game is super mario rpg because that's the other game i finally decided to play because of moon. (other things i have posted or discorded about playing are not single player on the couch games)
 
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